Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Lexar Professional 600x CF Cards

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Lexar Professional 600x CF Card

Following suit with SanDisk and PhotoFast, Lexar has introduced their Professional 600x CF card line.  They come in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flavors.  The 8GB version and 16GB version should start shipping this week.  The 32GB version will ship in November.

It looks like they smoke too – just check out Rob Galbraith’s tests of the new cards.  They hit it where it matters most, in camera.

The Lexar cards are faster in the Canon 7D than the SanDisk Extreme Pro and just a smidgen faster than the PhotoFast 533x Plus.  The SanDisk Extreme Pro is a little faster than the new Lexar 600x in the Nikon D300s; however, the Lexar cards manage to get 8 more images out of a burst of RAW + JPEG files than the SandDisk Extreme Pro (58 images vs. 50 images), which makes the Lexar on par with PhotoFast 533x Plus cards for burst capacity.

More details about the new Lexar 600x CF card series in the press release below. [Read more…]

 

PhotoFast CF and SD Cards Review

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I have been using a few memory cards from PhotoFast over the past few weeks alongside my usual mix of Lexar, Kingston and SanDisk cards. Specifically, the PhotoFast GMonster 533x 32GB and 533x Plus 16GB CF cards have spent a lot of time in my Canon 5D Mark II and a Nikon D300s that I’ve had on hand.  Additionally, I’ve tried out the PhotoFast 16GB Class 10 SD/SDHC card. [Read more…]

SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash Memory Cards

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SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB CF Card

SanDisk has announced a new series of faster CF cards – the Extreme Pro cards.  The big number that SanDisk is throwing out there is 90MB per second max read/write speeds. The question is: “Does it make a difference?”

Well, I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet; however, spec-wise the Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 50D should be able to take advantage of the speed boost.  Both cameras feature UDMA support up to Mode 6 for a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 133MB/s, which is well within the new SanDisk cards specs.

Lori Grunin over at Cnet’s Crave took the new Extreme Pro cards for a spin the the Nikon D300s (I couldn’t find any documentation confirming the extent of UDMA support for the D300s) and the Canon 5D Mark II.  The differences were minimal in both cases.  The D300s produced the same frame rate with Extreme Pro and 60MB/s flavor of Extreme cards.  The Pro version was able to give about a 10% savings on buffer emptying after a burst of shots.  The results were similar in the 5D Mark II, which got a boost of 0.2 frames per second with the Pro model and an almost 20% discount emptying the buffer after a burst of shots. Hit up Lori’s test for all the facts. [50 kudos to Lori for the hard work.]

Prices? The 64GB model will set you back $811.99 direct from SanDisk – I’ll say that again . . . $811.99!  $507.99 for the 32GB model and $304.00 for the 16GB model.  Hardly a bargain for a 0.2 fps advantage…

Get the full run down on these new cards in the news release below.

[Read more…]

Kingston Increases Capacity of CF Elite Pro Card to 32GB

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Kingston has stepped up the capacity for their Elite Pro series to 32GB.  I’ve been using a 16GB Kingston Elite Pro CF card for a a couple of months in my Canon 5D Mark II and have to say that it works quite well.  It slows down after about 9 continuous frames (the best I’ve seen so far has come from Lexar’s 300x 4GB CF Card at 15 continuous frames before it slows down).  With the Kingston 16GB Elite Pro, it’s also nice to have plenty of room for the 25MB to 30MB RAW files that the 5D Mark II produces.

The Kingston 32GB Elite Pro CF card retails for $154.  Check availability on Amazon.com.

More info in the following press release. [Read more…]

Pretec CFast Compact Flash Card – Transfer Rate of 160MB/s

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I think Pretec just dared Canon, Nikon or anyone else to produce some higher resolution video and faster frame rates.  The new Pretec CFast series of compact flash cards quadruples the write speed of the SanDisk Extreme IV.

And, if the performance lives up to the specs, the CFast series will eat as much HD video as your Canon 5D Mark II can throw at it.  Maybe we can stop referring to CF card specs as 133x, 266x and so on, since the CFast will be something like 1064x speed card.

Check out the details in the press release below. [Read more…]